“People like me. What does that mean?”

“You’ve got a smart mouth, son. Which is why you have to be told that these bastards are not playing games. They’re in power and they mean to stay in power, with whatever it takes. Last year there were just four executions at the Plot. This year there have already been twelve. And it’s going to get worse.”

A train thundered overhead, rendering all conversation meaningless for almost a minute. It sounded like a very large, very slow falling ax.

“That’s the thing about things getting worse,” I remarked. “Just as you’re thinking they can’t, they usually do. That’s what the fellow on the Jewish Desk at the Gestapo told me, anyway. There are some new laws on the way that mean my grandmother wasn’t quite German enough. Not that it matters much to her. She’s dead, too. But it seems as if it’s going to matter to me. If you follow my meaning.”

“Like Aaron’s rod.”

“Exactly. And you being an expert on forgers and counterfeiting, I was wondering if you knew someone who might help to fix it for me to lose the yarmulke. I used to think an Iron Cross was all the evidence I needed to be a German. But it would seem not.”

“A German’s worst problems always start when he starts to think of what it means to be a German.” Otto sighed and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Cheer up, yiddo. You’re not the first to need an Aryan transfusion. That’s what they call it these days. My paternal grandfather was a gyppo. That’s where I get my Latin good looks from.”

“I’ve never understood what they have against Gypsies.”

“I think it’s something to do with fortune-telling. Hitler just doesn’t want us to know the future he has planned for Germany.”

“It’s that or the price of clothespins, I suppose.” Gypsies were always selling clothespins.

Otto produced a nice gold Pelikan from his coat pocket and started to write a name and address on a piece of paper. “Emil is expensive, so try not to let your tribe’s reputation for driving a hard bargain lead you to suppose that he’s not worth every penny, because he is. Make sure you tell him I sent you and, if necessary, remind him that the only reason he’s not cooling his heels in the Punch is because I lost his file. But I lost it in a place where I can certainly find it again.”

The Punch was what Berlin ’s police and underworld called the courthouse and jail complex in Moabit; because Moabit was a heavily working-class district, someone had once described the prison there as “an imperial punch in the face of the Berlin proletariat.” Certainly a punch in the face was more or less guaranteed when you went there, regardless of your social class. It was without question Berlin ’s hardest concrete.

He told me what was in Emil Linthe’s file, so that I might make proper use of it when I spoke to him.

“Thanks, Otto.”

“This crime at the Adlon,” he said. “Anything there for me? Like a nice young girl who’s been passing dud checks?”

“It’s small fry for a bull like you. An antique box belonging to one of the guests got stolen. Besides, I already figured out who probably did it.”

“Even better. I can get the credit. Who did do it?”

“Some Ami blowhard’s stenographer. Jewish girl who’s already left Berlin.”

“Good-looking?”

“Forget it, Otto. She went home to Danzig.”

“ Danzig is good. I could use a trip somewhere nice.” He finished his drink. “Come on. We’ll go back across the road. As soon as you’ve reported it I can be on my way. I wonder why she went to Danzig. I thought Jews were leaving Danzig. Especially now that it’s gone Nazi. They don’t even like Berliners in Danzig.”

“Like everywhere else in Germany. We buy the rest of the country a beer, and still they hate us.” I finished my brandy. “Your neighbor’s field of corn is always better, I guess.”

“I thought everyone knew that Berlin is the most tolerant city in Germany. For one thing, it’s always been the only place that would tolerate the German government living here. Danzig. I ask you.”

“Then we’d better hurry before she realizes her mistake and comes back.”

7

THE FRONT DESK AT THE ALEX was the usual crowd scene from Hieronymus Bosch. A woman with a face like Erasmus and a pink pig’s bladder of a hat was reporting a burglary to a duty sergeant whose outsized ears looked as if they had belonged to someone else before being sliced off and stuck on the sides of his dog-shaped skull with a pencil and an unsmoked roll-up. Two spectacularly ugly thugs-their bloodied mugs stamped with the atavistic stigmata of criminality, their hands manacled behind their twisting backs-were being pushed and pulled into a dimly lit corridor that led down to the cells and a probable job offer from the SS. A cleaning woman, with a cigarette clamped firmly in her mouth against the smell, who was badly in need of a shave, was mopping a pool of vomit on the shit-brown linoleum floor. A lost-looking boy, his dirty face streaked with tears, was sitting fearfully in a corner underneath an enormous spiderweb and rocking on his stringy buttocks, and probably wondering if he’d make bail. A pale, rabbit-eyed attorney, carrying a briefcase as big as the well-fed sow whose hide had been used to fashion it, was demanding to see his client, except that no one was listening. Somewhere, someone was adducing his previous good character and his innocence of everything. Meanwhile a cop had removed his black leather shako and was showing a fellow SCHUPO the large purple bruise on his closely shaven head: it was probably just a thought making a futile bid to escape from his rusticated skull.

It felt awkward being back at the Alex. Awkward and exciting. I figured Martin Luther must have felt the same way when he turned up at the Diet of Worms to defend himself against a charge of spoiling the church door in Wittenberg. So many faces that were familiar. A few looked at me as if I were the prodigal son, but rather more seemed to regard me as the fatted calf.

Berlin Alexanderplatz. I could have told Alfred Döblin a thing or two.

Otto Trettin led me behind the desk and told a young uniformed cop to record my statement.

The cop was in his mid-twenties and, unusually by SCHUPO standards, was as bright as the badge on his ammunition pouch. He hadn’t been typing my statement very long when he stopped, bit his already well-bitten fingernails, lit a cigarette, and silently went over to a filing cabinet as big as a Mercedes that stood in the center of the huge room. He was taller than I’d expected. And thinner. He hadn’t been there long enough to get a taste for beer and get himself a pregnant belly, like a true SCHUPO man. He came back reading, which, in the Alex, was something of a miracle in itself.

“I thought so,” he said, handing Otto the file, but looking at me. “This object you’re reporting stolen was reported stolen yesterday. I took the particulars myself.”

“Chinese lacquer-and-basketry box,” said Otto, glancing over the report. “Fifty centimeters by thirty centimeters by ten centimeters.”

I tried to work that out in imperial measurement and gave up.

“Seventeenth century, Mong dynasty.” Otto looked at me. “That sound like the same box, Bernie?”

“Ming dynasty,” I said. “It’s Ming.”

“Ming, Mong, what’s the difference?”

“Either it’s the same box or they’re as common as pretzels. Who made the report?”

“A Dr. Martin Stock,” said the young cop. “From the Asiatic Museum. He was pretty exercised about it.”

“What kind of fellow was he?” I asked.

“Oh, you know. Kind of how you’d imagine someone from a museum would look. Sixtyish, gray mustache, white goatee, bald, myopic, overweight-he reminded me of the walrus at the zoo. He wore a bow tie-”

“I’ve seen that before,” said Otto. “A walrus wearing a bow tie.”